Max Boot’s Reagan Is the Worst Book of the Year

For months now, I’ve been urged to review Max Boot’s Reagan: His Life and Legend. I’ve resisted for many reasons. The first and overwhelming reason is that the book has so many distortions based on Boot’s highly selective rendering of Reagan that I couldn’t fathom addressing even a portion of them in a single review. More than that, reading the book was downright agonizing.

Yes, agonizing. Have you ever been in a situation where someone is misleading an audience by not giving them all the facts and you’re the one person in the room who knows it? I felt that way throughout my intermittent reading of Boot’s biography.

My reading was intermittent because I could handle the book only in small doses. I had to take breaks of not mere hours or days between readings but weeks and months. Worse, when I took on such ordeals during weekends, while taking my sons to the football field or basketball court, it put me in a bad mood, which I tried not to take out on my kids.

“What’s wrong, dad? What are you angry about?”

Friends and colleagues will acknowledge that I’m not an angry person. I’m happy and easy to get along with. But when you know an author is misleading his audience, and for the purpose of assassinating the character of an honorable individual, it makes you surly.

For Boot, the character assassination of Ronald Reagan is wielded most sharply on the matter of race. And he effectuates that outcome by leaving out crucial details. Boot does this to a degree that is so outrageous that it’s almost surely intentional, as I will demonstrate below.

Boot’s Flawed Methodology

Readers of this review might be surprised that my focus is not on Boot’s rendering of Reagan on communism and the Cold War. As some readers know, that’s my particular area of strength. I’ve published eight books on Ronald Reagan, more than any other historian or biographer, plus several on communism, the Cold War, Karl Marx and Marxism. Interestingly, Boot ignores those books, despite their being published by respected houses such as HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Harvard University Press, and several of them have been bestsellers, familiar to most students of Reagan.

And yet, in his 801-page tome, Boot cites only my biography of Reagan’s top aide, Bill Clark, oddly focusing on a minor item from Clark’s time as Governor Reagan’s chief of staff, namely, a controversy over an alleged “homosexual ring” involving certain Sacramento staffers, which Boot weirdly turned into a whole chapter. (Boot also briefly and disapprovingly cites my Clark biography on page 531, in relation to a Reagan administration National Security Decision Directive.)

Boot even ignored my 2006 HarperPerennial work, The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism, which is the basis of the 2024 feature biopic on Reagan starring Dennis Quaid.

Several Reagan scholars noticed this and contacted me. One of them sent an email asking, “Why in the world would Max Boot ignore effectively all your books on Reagan?” (READ MORE: “Yes, Ronald Reagan Did Win the Cold War.”)

Well, as I pushed through Boot’s book, I quickly discerned why: Boot had to ignore my Reagan material in order to concoct the narrative he desired. By not citing my work, one supposes he could at least perhaps claim ignorance of contradictory information.

It is interesting that Boot did not even consult me via email. Reagan biographers routinely ask me to review their manuscript before it goes into editing to see if I can spare them certain errors. That’s a standard process among biographers. We’re a band of brothers. Boot, however, never did so. Had he, I could have pointed out numerous areas where he was mistaken. It seems clear to me that Boot did not want to be corrected. He had his story and was sticking to it.

Boot’s method is to cherry pick sources that support his narrative, including sources that have been wrong about Ronald Reagan for decades. To cite just one (non-race) example, on page 233 he claims that several favorite Reagan quotes on Vladimir Lenin and Soviet expansionary aims were all untrue. “These quotes all have something in common,” asserts Boot confidently. “They are all false.” Where did Reagan come up with these falsities? According to Boot, from The Blue Book of the John Birch Society, compiled in 1958 by Robert Welch.

That itself is a frequent Boot tactic: Discredit an item by suggesting its origin was the John Birch Society. Personally, I instantly knew where Boot picked up that erroneous charge against Reagan. He references an October 8, 1985 piece in the New York Times. He doesn’t give the author’s name, but it was Times’ editorial writer Karl E. Meyer. I devoted a section of my 2010 book, Dupes, to Meyer’s embarrassing display of misinformation.

I described at length where Meyer was wrong and noted categorically why he had no basis to claim that Reagan got his information from the Birch book. I provided original primary sources for the quotations and the publisher included photos of pages from the original manuscripts where the Soviet quotes appeared.

Had Boot consulted me, he could have been spared such errors. But doing so would have undermined the point he wanted to make. Instead, he recycled a silly 40-year-old diatribe by Meyer.

Sadly, Boot’s readers will know no better.

It is striking that Boot felt compelled to make this declaration to readers on the first page of his introduction: “this book is strictly factual.” Most scholars wouldn’t feel the need to make such a declaration. Boot, however, felt compelled to do so.

In truth, the book is certainly not strictly factual. And the only way that Boot could convince himself and his readers of that is by shielding himself and them from a vast volume of counter information that would undermine many of his conclusions.

With all of that said, I’ve decided not to focus on Boot’s treatment of the epic achievement of Ronald Reagan’s life and presidency: the defeat of Soviet communism and peaceful victory in the Cold War. Boot’s treatment of Reagan on the matter of race is so egregious that it demands a review of its own. If I wanted to continue this review into Boot’s analysis of Reagan and the Cold War, I would be writing a review double or triple the length of this already unusually long review.

And besides, I have already wasted way too much time and energy on this fundamentally unfair book.

‘Burgie’ Burghardt and Reagan’s Black Friends

The gross unfairness by Max Boot toward Ronald Reagan on race is evident from the start of the book. Even when he should praise Reagan, Boot pulls back, misrepresents, or levels harsh charges, typically by selectively excluding key material.

On pages 59-60, for instance, Boot talks about the black friends that a young Reagan had on his football team at Eureka College in the late 1920s and early 1930s. These were dear friends of Dutch Reagan, at a time when black men were denied admission to colleges, banished from sports, or mistreated by classmates rather than befriended. Reagan and his little Midwest Christian college was a blessed exception.

For most Reagan biographers, this is a moving vignette in the life of Reagan, deserving of praise. Boot, however, quite disturbingly finds ways to twist it into a negative. In a shocking assertion that left me cursing at the page, Boot claims that this “handful” of black players at Eureka were Reagan’s “first and last African American friends.” He also says they “seldom communicated” after Eureka.

That is unequivocally false.

Boot offers no evidence for those claims. He can’t, because they have no basis whatsoever.

The fact is that Ronald Reagan had black friends long before Eureka and long after Eureka and remained friends with and communicated with them throughout his life. Here are just a few examples.

A close friend from “Dutch” Reagan’s days growing up in Dixon, Illinois in the 1920s was Winston McReynolds. They remained in touch right up until Winston’s dying days in 1976. Their friendship was recounted by Winston’s widow, Violet, during an interview in November 1980: Violet fondly recalled the moment when Reagan, during a return visit to Dixon in the middle of the 1976 presidential campaign, had given reporters the slip and gone to visit a very sick Winston in a Dixon nursing home. There, Reagan literally held the hand of the dying McReynolds. “I appreciated his coming to see Winston,” said McReynolds’ widow later. “I had a note from him when Wink passed away.”

That’s just one example that Boot ought to know about before making incendiary racial claims for which he has no substantiation or even reason to suspect. Two added examples are Eureka football teammate, Eudell Watts, Jr., and a female classmate of Reagan, Willie Sue Smith.

As with Winston McReynolds, Ronald Reagan remained in touch with Eudell Watts, Jr. for the remainder of Watts’s life, no matter Reagan’s fame or station. In fact, Eudell was contacted by Reagan in 1980 when the former governor paused to visit his old friend during a campaign stop in the northwestern Illinois area. As he did with all his living black classmates, Reagan made a point of tracking down his old friend.

Watts died in June 1990 at age 83. Saddened by the news, his lifelong pal and former teammate, now the former president of the United States, sent a personal letter of condolence to the family: “I’ll always be grateful for Lump’s friendship,” wrote Reagan from his California office, “and hope that Our Lord will comfort you with many warm memories of him.”

Willie Sue Smith was the sole black woman at Eureka College in Reagan’s tiny class of under 100. She was close to Dutch and his girlfriend, Mugs Cleaver. Throughout the remainder of her long life, Willie enjoyed telling reporters about how she passed love notes in class between Dutch and Mugs. She also went to church with them.

Smith and Reagan were pen pals for the rest of their lives, until he faded from Alzheimer’s. She was the last survivor of Reagan’s class of 1932, dying in August 2011 at age 101. Of all of Reagan’s Eureka’s classmates, black or white, Reagan’s longest bond was with Willie Sue Smith.

Max Boot should know this. He dug into the archives at Eureka College and interviewed and consulted the papers of the top historian there, as I have. That Eureka professor is an outstanding expert on Reagan and race; he created at the college a superb display exhibit of these Reagan relationships, with letters and photos. I can’t imagine that Boot does not know this, or that he didn’t see it.

A particularly egregious example of Boot’s distortion on Reagan and race is the case of William Franklin “Burgie” Burghardt.

Burgie was flatly Ronald Reagan’s best friend in college — and remained his “closest friend” (in Reagan’s own words) long thereafter. Reagan referred to him as “probably the closest friend I ever had,” and he said this repeatedly over the years, publicly and privately, prior to, during, and after his presidency, including in profiles done by major newspapers.

That is quite a statement by Reagan. And Burgie reciprocated: “We were very close.”

How does Boot frame that friendship?

Boot snidely reports: “Burghardt … told a reporter that ‘we seem to have a mutual respect and admiration,’ but Reagan was stretching the truth when, in response to criticism from African Americans, he claimed that ‘we remained close friends throughout the years.’ In truth, they seldom communicated.’”

In truth, Boot is wrong and misrepresented this. He surely did so intentionally, because Boot cites as his source for that quote a March 7, 1981 Washington Post article on Reagan and Burgie that laid out their relationship at length and showed that they regularly communicated over the years. A nice human-interest piece that was not a “response to criticism from African Americans” by Reagan, the Post reporter noted that Burgie had compiled a collection of letters from Reagan dating back to the 1940s, filed in a scrapbook. His den displayed telegrams, letters, photos, and more.

Significantly, the Post article — which, to repeat, Boot knows about because he cites it in his endnotes — provides these exact details that I’ve shared here. Boot’s book, however, includes none of these details. In fact, the Post piece further says of Burgie: “He last saw Reagan when he went along on a campaign swing to Detroit, during which Reagan garnered the endorsements of black leaders including Ralph Abernathy and Hosea Williams. Before that Burgie and Dutch spent part of an afternoon together at the house Reagan rented in Virginia during the campaign.” That would have been just a few months before the article appeared.

This begs a serious question about Boot and his scholarship, to wit: Why did Max Boot not share these crucial facts with his readers?

Of course, if Boot had shared those facts, they would have completely annihilated his preferred claim that Reagan and Burgie “seldom communicated.”

So, how close were Reagan and Burgie? I’ll finish with a quite touching answer, which certainly does not appear in Boot’s book: On August 6, 1981, several months after the appearance of that March 1981 Washington Post piece, President Reagan paused from a crazy busy day running the United States of America to telephone his close friend just before Burgie went into surgery for a lung procedure. It turned out to be a surgery with grave complications. Burgie died two days later.

Reagan immediately telephoned Burgie’s wife, Dr. Ida Stevens Burghardt. The president of the United States shared his sadness over the loss of a dear friend he had known for a half century.

The truth is that Ronald Reagan and Burgie frequently communicated, right up until Burgie’s final hours of life. Max Boot quite egregiously distorted that dear friendship.

The ‘States’ Rights’ Trope

Throughout his treatment of Reagan, Boot works up various tropes to try to reframe his subject as racially insensitive, as pandering to racists, or even as a racist himself, which Boot never quite says but certainly implies. One of those tropes is Boot’s slanted understanding of states’ rights.

To lay the groundwork for that angle, Boot first goes after Barry Goldwater. I would prefer in this review to focus strictly on Ronald Reagan, but one needs to see what Boot does with Goldwater in order to understand how he sets up his longer argument against Reagan on states’ rights.

“Although Goldwater was not personally racist,” begins Boot before the predictable “but,” “he made common cause with racists by endorsing ‘state’s rights’ [mistaken possessive original], the Southern slogan for resisting desegregation.”

To the contrary, Barry Goldwater from the outset resisted making any such common cause. He tried to head off any racist supporters who backed his presidential candidacy based on a mistaken view that his protection of states’ rights — that is, the 10th Amendment — meant that he advocated segregation. The 10th Amendment is clear and succinct: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

To writers like Max Boot, however, properly discerning and explaining the conservative position on the 10th Amendment would undermine the preferred narrative on race. Like many leftists (though a former conservative, Boot claims he has not become a leftist, despite reportedly claiming to be “woke” on domestic social issues), Boot wants to strangely suggest that an invocation of “states’ rights” is a “dog whistle” for racism.

One might here respond by advising Boot to read Barry Goldwater’s classic book for clarification and correction. But in fact, Boot did read the book, which he says that Goldwater had written “at the urging of Clarence Manion, a member of the John Birch Society.” (Again, we see the slimy tactic by Boot: dismiss an item by suggesting that the basis for it was the John Birch Society.) Boot cites Goldwater’s The Conscience of a Conservative in the endnote of the paragraph contending that Goldwater “made common cause with racists by endorsing ‘state’s rights.’”

Well, given that Boot has read Goldwater’s book, he surely knows that Goldwater carefully intended just the opposite. Chapter three of The Conscience of a Conservative is titled simply, “States’ Rights.” It is followed by chapter four, titled, “And Civil Rights.” Goldwater wanted readers to connect the two. He did not want advocates of states’ rights to ignore civil rights, nor vice versa.

Goldwater opened chapter four, “And Civil Rights,” by stating upfront and unequivocally: “An attempt has been made in recent years to disparage the principle of States’ Rights [upper case original] by equating it with defense of the South’s position on racial integration. I have already indicated that the reach of States’ Rights is much broader than that — that it affects Northerners as well as Southerners, and concerns many matters that have nothing to do with the race question.”

Indeed, Goldwater had shown precisely that in the previous chapter, which he opened by quoting at length none other than former New York Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt. FDR as president was the ultimate promoter of a strong, centralized national government. But as New York governor, the liberal Democrat, like any governor, did not hesitate to defend states’ rights.

FDR invoked states’ rights in defense of what he called “a great number of … vital problems of government, such as the conduct of public utilities, of banks, of insurance, of business, of agriculture, of education, of social welfare, and a dozen other important features.” FDR insisted that “Washington must not … interfere” in these areas that were the province of the states.

Goldwater conceded that

it is quite true that the [racial] integration issue is affected by the States’ Rights principle, and that the South’s position on the issue is, today, the most conspicuous expression of the principles. So much so that the country is now in the grips of a spirited and sometimes ugly controversy over an imagined conflict between States’ Rights, on the one hand, and what are called ‘civil rights’ on the other.

Imagined? Yes. Goldwater explained: “I say an imagined conflict because I deny that there can [emphasis original] be a conflict between States’ Rights, properly defined — and civil rights, properly defined.” Resolving this conflict was not rocket science. As Goldwater noted, “If ‘States’ Rights’ are so asserted as to encroach upon individual rights that are protected by valid federal laws, then the exercise of state power is a nullity.”

Just as states’ rights were succinctly defined by the 10th Amendment, noted Goldwater, civil rights “should be no harder” to define. But unfortunately, “thanks to extravagant and shameless misuse by people who ought to know better,” civil rights were being badly misunderstood and abused by politicians and ideologues.

That misunderstanding and misuse continues to this day, exploited by liberals in particular. And by Max Boot.

It is no exaggeration to say that Boot’s book ignores every single line and section of The Conscience of a Conservative that would nullify his thesis. A preferred narrative is favored and constructed. And thus, several chapters after dealing with Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Boot leads chapter 32 with this ominous quote from Reagan, “I believe in states’ rights.” By that point in Boot’s polemic, the reader has been taught that a belief in states’ rights constitutes a belief in segregation. The reader shudders at the Reagan quotation.

It is astounding that Boot can cling to anachronistic propaganda of the 1960s to smear Ronald Reagan for championing states rights in the wake of an era in which liberals made effective use of the 10th amendment in their crusades for gay marriage, sanctuary cities, pot legalization, health insurance exchanges, and Medicaid expansion. The club of “states’ rights” used by the Left to hammer conservatives over segregation was seized in 2013, when the liberal standard-bearer Atlantic magazine declared “States’ Rights Are for Liberals.”

But smearing Reagan is Boot’s objective. In order to wield the race club, he needs to establish that any mention of states’ rights by Reagan is a racial “dog whistle.” Boot insists: “Reagan, like Goldwater, was more than capable of catering to white racists.” How did such “catering” occur? By defending states’ rights.

That is, by defending the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The Neshoba Smear

To that end, Boot tees off on Reagan in chapter 32, which is titled, “What It Took,” leading off with the menacing statement from Reagan, “I believe in states’ rights.” The chapter is riddled with warped interpretations and selective information.

Boot sets the table by claiming that the 1980 Reagan-Bush campaign “would be dogged by controversy.” Of what sort? By Reagan’s “appeals to bigoted voters.” Where were these bigots? Boot impugns both the voters and Reagan by stating: “Ronald Reagan’s first postconvention campaign stop in 1980 was at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi.” This is framed as a devil’s den of racism.

Actually, the fair was not in Philadelphia, Mississippi. But Boot, like various leftist writers who have attacked Reagan with this recent smear, wants to place the fair in the city of Philadelphia, Mississippi because that was the site where three civil rights workers were killed in 1964: James Chaney from Meridian, Mississippi, who was black, and Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner from New York City, both of whom were white. With incredible crudeness, attempts have been made by hack left-wing writers to suggest that Ronald Reagan’s appearance at the county fair in 1980 somehow meant that he was callously insensitive to that crime in the city of Philadelphia in 1964.

Moreover, these writers — Boot among them — make it sound as if only Ronald Reagan and white supremacists had spoken at the fair. Indeed, in the next line, Boot describes the fairgrounds as “long a forum for white supremacist rabble-rousers such as Mississippi governors Theodore Bilbo and Ross Barnett.”

That sounds very bad. If that’s all the reader is told. But here’s the crucial missing material that Max Boot fails to tell readers:

Numerous politicians for over a century had spoken at the Neshoba County Fair, including recent Democratic presidential candidates before, during, and after Reagan. Included in this group were Ohio Senator John Glenn in 1983 and the party’s presidential nominee in 1988, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis.

Another major political figure who spoke at the Neshoba Fair was Republican Jack Kemp, who was regarded as the most racially sensitive of probably all Republican politicians over the past half century. Kemp was widely liked by black Americans and respected by liberals on civil rights. No one accuses Jack Kemp of racism. And no doubt, when Kemp made plans to speak at the fair, he, like Reagan, expected to see lots of black people there — and did.

The fact is that countless politicians inside Mississippi, from outside the state, and campaigning in the South generally had long spoken at the fairgrounds. The fair has been described as Mississippi’s annual “Giant House Party.” Everyone goes to it, black and white alike. Indeed, why wouldn’t they? According to the 2020 Census, Neshoba County is 44 percent non-white. It is far more ethnically diverse than the vast majority of counties in America.

Boot does concede that the county is one-third black, but he then quite remarkably asserts that “the fairgoers were almost exclusively white.” That is patently untrue. The fair is racially mixed. I have talked to people who go to the fair every year. But even then, one need not track down attendees. The racially diverse attendees are clear to anyone who looks at fair photos in newspapers and history books. Black boys and girls and men and women (as well as the local Choctaw Indians and other ethnic minorities) participate with whites in cooking contests, marching bands, dance troupes, the annual Miss Neshoba Beauty Pageant, and more.

Also striking is the diverse musical talent that plays at the fair every summer: In addition to major country performers and mainstream pop artists like Jerry Lee Lewis, the Blues Brothers, Loretta Lynn, Patsy Cline, Marty Robbins, and George Strait, as well as modern stars like Britney Spears, Rascal Flatts, Sara Evans, Toby Keith, and Trace Adkins, black and other ethnic-minority musicians have likewise played at the fair, including The Jackson Five, The Spinners, The Jets, The Platters, Gloria Estefan and the Miami Sound Machine, and more.

Do only white rednecks go there to watch The Jacksons? Of course, not. The fair is a mass gathering of all people throughout the state, every year. By the time of Reagan’s visit, the civil rights revolution had left the Mississippi of Bilbo and Barnett in the dustbin of history.

But Boot’s distortions on Neshoba get worse.

According to Boot, the entire purpose of the Reagan campaign at Neshoba in August 1980 was “for Reagan to come to Mississippi and utter a two-word incantation: states’ rights [emphasis original]. This was the slogan that Southern segregationists had been using to resist federal civil rights efforts for decades.”

That specific claim by Boot is a first. Sure, various hack-leftist writers have eviscerated Ronald Reagan for merely mentioning states’ rights at Neshoba, but I’ve never heard anyone claim that such was the sole purpose of Reagan’s visit there in August 1980. Boot’s claim is nonsense, with no evidence to back it.

The best that he can do is try to point to Mississippi Republican Trent Lott, who has become a whipping boy for liberals on race issues. “According to state party officials,” writes Boot, not naming any of these alleged “officials,” nor offering a citation, it was the nefarious Lott who had “insisted” that Reagan come to Mississippi to utter this abominable “two-word incantation: states’ rights.”

Interestingly, Boot actually tracked down Lott and interviewed him on this charge. And what did Lott say? He told Max Boot just the opposite: “In an interview for this book, Lott denied that he had told Reagan to use ‘states’ rights’ and insisted, implausibly, that he had no idea that it was such a ‘loaded phrase.’”

Lott denied it! Thus, Boot’s only source for the charge denies the very charge itself.

And why would this be “implausible”? It is implausible to the likes of Boot, who deem states’ rights a “loaded phrase” for segregation. That’s their slanted interpretation. Even then, that’s beside the point. To repeat: Boot claims that it was Trent Lott who brought Ronald Reagan to Neshoba for the purpose of delivering this ominous two-word “slogan” for segregation, and Lott flat out said the opposite.

Alas, what was the dread context in which Ronald Reagan used the phrase “states’ rights” at the Neshoba fair? It was the same context that he and Barry Goldwater and other conservatives had been using for decades (and that the framers of the Constitution had used two centuries prior). To quote Reagan’s exact words at Neshoba:

I believe in states’ rights. I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level. And I believe that we’ve distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the Constitution to that federal establishment. And if I do get the job I’m looking for [applause], I will devote myself to trying to reorder those priorities and to restore to the states and local communities those functions that properly belong there.

Obviously, this was classic 10th Amendment constitutionalism. It was standard federalism. But not to Max Boot. By Boot’s reckoning, this is to be interpreted as a statement against civil rights and for Jim Crow.

And yet, curiously, Boot notes that in Reagan’s speech, “There was not a word about civil rights.” Precisely! That was because Reagan’s remark about states’ rights was not about civil rights.

Reagan Speaking of States’ Rights in New York City

That statement by Ronald Reagan will sound familiar to students of Reagan. After all, it was what Reagan had said in his 1980 campaign kick-off speech in New York City in November 1979, and elsewhere. He had said it often, everywhere around the country for decades, going back to his General Electric speeches even before he first ran for office in California in 1966. This was not some hit-and-run appeal to Southern racists done one time by a racially exploitive Reagan in Philadelphia, Mississippi in August 1980.

It’s worth quoting that Reagan speech in New York City, considering that Boot mistakenly tells his readers that Reagan “seldom, if ever, used the phrase ‘states’ rights.’”

Reagan actually launched his campaign not in Philadelphia, Mississippi, nor even at the Neshoba Fair in August 1980, but in New York City on November 13, 1979. His words in New York City were all classic Reagan, going back to speeches in the 1960s. That means that the speech included a line about the proper balance between state and local governments and the federal government — i.e., the 10th Amendment. “The 10th article of the Bill of Rights is explicit in pointing out that the federal government should do only those things specifically called for in the Constitution,” said Reagan in New York City. “All others shall remain with the states or the people. We haven’t been observing that 10th article of late.”

To repeat: Max Boot misinforms his readers that Reagan “seldom, if ever, used the phrase ‘states’ rights,’” implying that Reagan did so only at Neshoba, and that such was his sole purpose in going there. “It was not a standard part of his stump speech,” claims Boot. “It beggars [sic] belief that he could have used it at the Neshoba County Fair, of all places, while remaining ignorant of what those two noxious words connoted.”

No, Boot, that is what those two noxious words mean to you, in your biased rendering.

Reading this, it is hard to fathom that Max Boot could have once supposedly been a conservative. Conservatives do not view states’ rights as “noxious words” applying strictly to racial segregation. Such an assertion is absurd. But sadly, this is the racial game being played to smear certain people on the conservative side, such as Ronald Reagan.

Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, and the KKK

While hammering Ronald Reagan on the Neshoba issue, Boot strangely rushes to the defense of President Jimmy Carter, even in a situation where the liberal media had rightly gone after Carter.

“Instead of savaging Reagan, however, the press corps went after Carter [emphasis original],” Boot marvels to his readers. And why had the media done this? Because Jimmy Carter had accused Ronald Reagan of engaging in “hatred” and “racism.”

By this point in Boot’s skewed presentation, readers assume that the media was off its rocker. After all, the most natural thing in the world was to accuse Ronald Reagan of hatred and racism. Quite amazingly, however, Boot gives no context whatsoever for what Carter had said and why the press was angry at him. Here’s what happened.

During the heat of the 1980 campaign, as he was losing, President Jimmy Carter and his surrogates desperately attempted to connect Ronald Reagan to the KKK because of an endorsement of Reagan by a crackpot Klansman. Carter, the Bible-believing, born-again Baptist, shamelessly did this at no less than the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Ebenezer Baptist Church: “Obviously the Ku Klux Klan is an obnoxious blight on the American scene,” Carter told the press there that morning, “and anyone who injected it into the campaign made a serious mistake.”

Everyone was shocked by this low blow from Carter. Reagan was appalled. As someone who had fought the Klan his entire life (certainly more so than Jimmy Carter had), Reagan did not hesitate to rebuke the endorsement. He would have preferred to ignore it. But knowing how merciless his political opponents were, Reagan knew he better promptly denounce whatever words of support had come from within the racist organization.

That didn’t matter to the Carter team. They were ready to roll with the race card. The press took notice.

The Washington Post noted that this was not the first attempt by the Carter campaign to link Ronald Reagan to the KKK. President Carter’s secretary of Health and Human Services, Patricia Harris, had outrageously asserted, “When I hear Reagan’s name, I see the specter of white sheets.” Of course, noted the Post, the Klan’s endorsement of Reagan was “an endorsement Reagan promptly repudiated.”

That did not matter to Carter’s political people.

The Post also noted that Carter’s U.N. ambassador, Andrew Young, had recently written a newspaper column “noting angrily the KKK endorsement of Reagan and his party’s platform.” Young had sat with Carter in the pew at the Rev. Dr. King’s church, along with King’s widow and father, when Carter took his shot at Reagan.

Those are just a few insidious examples from Carter’s team, which even the Washington Post highlighted as outrages. As the Post noted, Carter did nothing to stop or dissuade these smears; to the contrary, he embraced them. He hoped the dirty politics would work.

Carter’s unexpected, unfair blows were jarring to everyone. Even the partisan Democrat press was disgusted. The Post was struck by Carter’s sudden stridency, denouncing the president’s new “campaign pattern” of “hard-hitting attacks, often opting for the most extreme public interpretation of Reagan’s record on controversial issues.”

Aside from the Post, various liberal politicians and journalists were taken aback, from the likes of New York’s Mario Cuomo to columnists Jack Germond and Jules Witcover and more. New York Times’s liberal columnist James “Scotty” Reston was struck by Carter’s “mean and cunning antics.” The president had become “angry and vindictive.”

Hugh Sidey, Time magazine’s dean of Washington journalists, was alarmed by Carter’s “petty vituperation,” especially behind his cloak of Christian faith: “The wrath that escapes Carter’s lips about racism and hatred when he prays and poses as the epitome of Christian charity leads even his supporters to protest his meanness.”

Fair-minded liberal historians likewise have taken note of Carter’s dark turn. Rick Perlstein agrees that “Jimmy Carter had crossed a line,” and had demonstrated a “meanness” that itself had become a campaign issue. Perlstein notes how Carter in his next press conference tried to defend himself by claiming that “my campaign is very moderate in its tone.” A reporter disagreed, correcting Carter: “You’ve accused him [Reagan] of interjecting the Ku Klux Klan into the campaign.”

Incidentally, Max Boot is aware of Rick Perlstein’s reporting on this incident. He, too, quotes from Perlstein’s book, albeit not the statement that “Jimmy Carter had crossed a line” with his “meanness.” Using this quote would undermine Boot’s argument and his effort to portray Carter, not Reagan, as the victim.

Making all of this worse, Boot leaves out another really crucial detail in this Carter-Reagan-race saga:

In the height of irony, it was actually Jimmy Carter, not Ronald Reagan, who just two weeks earlier had kicked off his campaign in a town that was home to the KKK, with Klansmen literally strutting through the town in white hoods the very morning of Carter’s speech in Tuscumbia, Alabama. Yes, the morning of Carter’s kickoff speech, the Klan marched through the town in white hoods. The event was covered by the national media. Here is how the Washington Post reported it:

It was not nostalgia but cold, hard political calculation that brought the president South today to open his general election campaign….

The area around Tuscumbia is largely white, fundamentalist Christian, traditionally Democratic and conservative. Recently the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan made Tuscumbia its national headquarters and this morning, before Carter’s arrival, a handful of Klan members marched through the town streets.

That was what the Post reported, as did other sources. Thus, in turn, the Reagan campaign and liberal reporters alike found it wildly hypocritical that the Carter campaign and president himself would be trying to link Ronald Reagan to the KKK because of an endorsement by some sole crackpot Klansman. All were alarmed at what was widely perceived as a dark, mean turn by Carter. Boot’s narrative, however, is that the media was treating Carter unfairly, and should have gone after Reagan — for racism.

For Boot, creating that narrative for readers requires not giving all those details on Carter — that is, on the 39th president’s dark, mean turn and the KKK marching in Tuscumbia.

The ‘Welfare Queen’ Smear

Further grinding the racial axe, Max Boot also lays into Reagan with a new favorite trope peddled by the American Left in recent years, namely, that Reagan had used racial “code words” like “welfare queens” to exploit racist sentiment.

Here again, if Max Boot had consulted me, I could have spared him this embarrassing mistake as well. I wrote a lengthy article for The American Spectator debunking this smear in May 2023. Readers can click there for my larger treatment, but I’ll recount just a few details here. (READ MORE: California’s Reparations Committee Owes the Reagan Family an Apology)

The specific “welfare queen” in question was a Chicago woman named Linda Taylor. Boot contends that Ronald Reagan during the 1976 campaign created a “garbled account” of the woman’s story that “originally ran in the Chicago Tribune and that was picked up by Human Events.”

Again, the common Boot tactic: discredit a certain Reagan action by linking its origins to a conservative source, such as the John Birch Society or, in this case, Human Events. That’s a cue to his liberal readers to scoff and immediately treat Reagan’s claim with disdain. But in fact, there’s another source for the “welfare queen” claim.

Ronald Reagan did not coin the term “welfare queen” for the woman in question. Rather, that was the term used by the Chicago newspaper and other media sources that reported on her. Reagan highlighted her as a case of welfare fraud, and never once, ever, denoted her race — which, for the record, was not black.

Reagan actually referred to her as the “so-called ‘welfare queen,’” because plenty of other sources, including the New York Times and even black publications like Jet magazine, had called her that. As noted by Rick Perlstein, the Chicago Tribune between the years 1974-80 referred to “welfare queen” in no less than 80 different stories. It was a popular term. It was hardly Reagan’s. As historian and Reagan biographer Craig Shirley adds, “Both the Washington Post and The New York Times did lengthy stories on Chicago’s ‘Welfare Queen’ long before Reagan.”

Boot paints Reagan’s portrayal of the woman as another instance of rotgut racial campaign tactics. “The most noxious Reagan falsehoods were ones that touched on incendiary matters of race,” avers Boot. “[H]e was not subtle in 1976 about tapping into white fear and resentment of minorities, employing racist dog whistles.” That’s Boot’s setup for the “welfare queen” section.

But there’s a major problem with this element of the Boot narrative, namely: Linda Taylor was not actually black. Very deceptively, Boot’s lead line on Taylor starts, “No Reagan story attracted more attention than the one about the ‘welfare queen’ who appeared to be Black.”

Hmm. Boot’s readers surely pause at that formulation: “appeared to be Black.” Wait a minute — was she black or not? Boot does not elaborate. That’s a critical distinction he doesn’t care to clarify. Remarkably, Boot makes reference to a book on Taylor by a very fair liberal journalist named Josh Levin, who first did an exposé on Taylor for the left-wing Slate magazine in December 2013. But Boot doesn’t bother to tell people that in that book Levin deals with the question of Taylor’s mixed race, her claims at various times of different ethnicity (even of being white), and much more. In fact, according to her birth record, Taylor was white! Levin reported precisely that — and Boot knows it, having read and recommended Levin’s reportage.

As Levin shows, those confusing complications in Taylor’s life illustrated the central fact that she was a massive fraudster of the welfare system. That was exactly the point made by Reagan and the numerous newspapers who reported on Taylor. And yet Reagan himself never once claimed that Taylor was black. He never mentioned her ethnicity, at all.

Boot’s Big Bigot

All of this is done by Max Boot for the purpose of portraying Ronald Reagan as a bigot. There are still other examples, such as his awful misrepresentation of Reagan’s touching reaction to the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination on April 4, 1968. But there is only so much that one review can cover.

At one point, Boot no doubt angers even Ronald Reagan’s liberal children, Ron and Patti, when, citing them and longtime Reagan friends and aides, Boot relates that they “told me that they never heard him [Reagan] use racial epithets even in private.” Boot arrogantly dismisses them and their eyewitness, writing that he finds this “doubtful.” It’s a very conceited judgment, considering that Boot never spent even one minute with Reagan, whereas Reagan’s kids spent decades with the man. It’s a rather vulgar assertion from a biographer who has not a shred of evidence for such a claim.

In truth, no one who knew the man — nor even his contemporary critics on race — believed he was a bigot.

“Ronald Reagan was not a bigot,” emphatically states Lou Cannon, the Reagan biographer who knew him the longest.

“Ronald Reagan did not have a drop of racism in his body,” adds Doug Brinkley, esteemed historian and editor of the Reagan Diaries.

“Reagan didn’t have a racist bone in his body,” agrees prolific Reagan biographer Craig Shirley.

“I consider Mr. Reagan personally not to be a racist,” said the NAACP’s Benjamin Hooks, an intensely partisan Democrat who constantly clashed with Ronald Reagan on issue after issue.

Another of Reagan’s toughest African American detractors on racial issues, Washington Post columnist William Raspberry, stated clearly at Reagan’s death: “I don’t accuse Reagan of racism.”

Max Boot, however, would like us to believe that he knows better than all of them, including Reagan’s own children.

Naturally eating up Boot’s work are his new fans on the Left. In an interview with The Guardian, the reporter revels in Boot’s reportage, appreciating that Boot has pierced Reagan’s reputation for “sunny optimism” and exposed his “darker legacy on issues like race.” This, you see, helped “pave the way for Trump.” Yes, Boot darkly tells The Guardian, “You can trace the linkages.”

This is the new narrative among leftists who want to illustrate the “road of Republican racism,” from Reagan to Trump.

Those who follow Boot’s career know that he left conservatism during the Donald Trump years. They figured he had probably become something of a moderate. This book would suggest that Boot has become a left-wing polemicist. It accepts at face value and echoes, pounds, and hammers dominant talking points of the Left, with a bias for left-wing sources and often a contempt for conservative ones. It is written to please Boot’s new friends and fans on the Left. It’s no surprise whatsoever that the likes of the New York Times and The New Yorker named it one of the “best books” of 2024.

Of course, they did. This book is for them.

*          *          *

As I said from the outset, this review focuses on Boot’s mistreatment of Ronald Reagan on the issue of race, and readers who know my work will be surprised to see that I haven’t examined what Boot says about Reagan and the Cold War. But I stopped my reading three-quarters into the book at chapter 38, “The Cold War Heats Up.” I was emotionally drained by that point. Enough.

Is the editor and publisher — Liveright, an imprint of W. W. Norton & Company — aware of just how bad Boot misrepresented Reagan? How about the endorsers? The book includes glowing endorsements on the back cover from names like Walter Isaacson, Mark Bowden, Karen Tumulty, Robert Mann, James Graham Wilson, David E. Hoffman. Are they aware of this book’s many sins of omission?

Those in the know are aware. The problem is that not enough readers are in the know. And it is to them that Max Boot’s biography of Ronald Reagan is ultimately aimed at. His optimal readers are those who don’t know enough about Reagan to know they’re being misled.

READ MORE from Paul Kengor:

Trump and Reagan: Two Hostage Crises, Two Inaugurations

American Spectator Editor Paul Kengor on Jimmy Carter

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